Abstract

Commercial wine yeast strains of the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae have been selected to satisfy many different, and sometimes highly specific, oenological requirements. As a consequence, more than 200 different strains with significantly diverging phenotypic traits are produced globally. This genetic resource has been rather neglected by the scientific community because industrial strains are less easily manipulated than the limited number of laboratory strains that have been successfully employed to investigate fundamental aspects of cellular biology. However, laboratory strains are unsuitable for the study of many phenotypes that are of significant scientific and industrial interest. Here we investigate whether a comparative transcriptomics and phenomics approach, based on the analysis of five phenotypically diverging industrial wine yeast strains, can provide insights into the molecular networks that are responsible for the expression of such phenotypes. For this purpose, some oenologically relevant phenotypes, including resistance to various stresses, cell wall properties and metabolite production of these strains were evaluated, and aligned with transcriptomic data collected during alcoholic fermentation. The data reveal significant differences in gene regulation between the five strains. While the genetic complexity underlying the various successive stress responses in a dynamic system such as wine fermentation reveal the limits of the approach, many of the relevant differences in gene expression can be linked to specific phenotypic differences between the strains. This is in particular the case for many aspects of metabolic regulation. The comparative approach therefore opens new possibilities to investigate complex phenotypic traits on a molecular level.

Interaction Annotations

Increase the total number of rows showing on this page by using the pull-down located below the table, or use the
page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column
header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; click on the small
"i" buttons located within a cell for an annotation to view further details about experiment type and any other
genes involved in the interaction.

Gene Ontology Annotations

Increase the total number of rows showing on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page
scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header
to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table.

Phenotype Annotations

Increase the total number of rows showing on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the page
scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column header
to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; click on the small "i"
buttons located within a cell for an annotation to view further details.

Regulation Annotations

Increase the total number of rows displayed on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the
page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column
header to sort by that column; to filter the table by a specific experiment type, type a keyword into the Filter box
(for example, “microarray”); download this table as a .txt file using the Download button or click Analyze to
further view and analyze the list of target genes using GO Term Finder, GO Slim Mapper, SPELL, or YeastMine.

Expression Datasets

Increase the total number of rows displayed on this page using the pull-down located below the table, or use the
page scroll at the table's top right to browse through the table's pages; use the arrows to the right of a column
header to sort by that column; filter the table using the "Filter" box at the top of the table; download this table
as a .txt file using the Download button;